Friday, August 29, 2003

 
when are the lights coming back on?

Cultural history of the night
Festive and frightening: In history, nocturnal urban darkness was the norm
"During the most recent blackout, many people remarked that there was a strangely "festive" atmosphere as many neighbours and strangers started talking to each other on the streets. "Night tends to be associated with leisure, with freedom, with the release of bonds," notes Professor Keith Walden, who teaches a course on the "history of the night" at Trent University in Peterborough. "It is also associated with things that are hidden and anonymity, so you can do things at night that you might not otherwise do."
Like many cultural historians, Walden believes such modern festive occasions as Halloween are rooted in a tradition of "carnival-esque" celebration in which the normal rules of society are inverted. The carnival-esque is a broad term describing a host of festivals and holidays that flourished in the pre-modern world, where the normal rules of society get turned upside down as everybody wears masks and assumes a new identity."
Jeet Heer

Where were you when the lights went out? - by Ian Brown
"Which one is true: The public, well-lit being that you present to the world by day? Or the private shadow no one can see?
[... ] But even better than being deprived of TV, we're deprived of TV's coverage of the calamity -- no endless loops, no hyperbolic pundit gamma blab. This is maybe the strangest thing of all: For the first time in a long while, a disaster is experienced first-hand by all involved, rather than watched over and over and over again. It's as if a great compulsion has been lifted from millions of voyeur addicts, and they are all pulsing with the freedom of the newly sober.
[... ] In a book called Night as Frontier, a sociologist named Murray Melbin claims that night was one of the last wildernesses to be conquered -- a lawless space that had to be dominated the same way the West was won. According to Mr. Melbin, the first night prowlers were outsiders who felt uneasy in the straight, lit world.
But they were quickly followed by the people they least wanted to see -- businessmen, who saw the unilluminated night as unused productivity. Commercial lighting created night shifts and night life and, before long, the sleepless, restless, man-made, 24-hour world. And with each technological upping of the wattage, natural darkness disappeared exponentially: One gas mantle produced as much light as a dozen candles, a single electric light bulb as much as a hundred. The more darkness is commodified and costed out, the more we secretly long for it, though we may not know that until darkness unexpectedly falls."

Heart of darkness - Barbara Fletcher
"Gorgeous stars, unveiled from light pollution. Pinpricks of light through a velvet canvas: a blacked out downtown sky in the largest city of Canada.
And then, on the way home from our travels, we noticed a small, red star to the southeast, and realized that it was Mars."

Stars Get in Your Eyes - Jennifer Floyd
"I imagined all the people who've never been out away from the city, who've never seen more than the dozen or so stars bright enough to be seen over the glow of the lights. I imagined that in their frustration and confusion and stickiness they looked to the sky in exasperation and saw those beautiful stars. I imagined that moment when they first realized what they were looking at, that glorious spread of the Milky Way ..."

eye weekly - editorial - 'Reaching for the stars'
... the arch of stars is a thing of infinite beauty, what the !Kung people of the Kalahari desert call the "backbone of the night."

The Day the Lights Went Out - darksky.org
"You can actually see the stars in New York City."

Lindsay Robertson - 'Talking to Strangers' - knot.magazine - 18.08.03
"We sat on a jetty and drank wine from a communal glass, dangling our legs over the side and gazing at the eerie dark silhouette of Manhattan across from us. We talked about how we couldn't make this vision appear before us even if we tried, and how sad we were for people who were away from the city that night.
... We listened to the radio and shuddered at the thought of being trapped under the river in a subway car. We were wondering about the still-busy flight path above us when we noticed something: the stars!
... We heard people say this night was like September 11 with all of the closeness and none of the fear, that it was magical, exhilarating, an unexpected gift. What seemed at first like a crisis became the opportunity to break down the boundaries that separate people, to do silly crazy things because all of the usual rules were suspended, and for the love of god, to finally see the stars."

A Look at the Stars - [from Mr. Dowling's Electronic Passport]
"The sky was filled with stars. Beautiful bright stars set off against a black autumn night. It was November 9, 1965, the night of the Great Blackout."

Marshall McLuhan made the following superficially trivial observation:
"... media, by altering the environment, evoke in us their unique ratios of sense perceptions. The extension of any one sense alters the way we think and act - the way we perceive the world. Were the Great Blackout of 1965 to have continued for half a year, there would be no doubt how electric technology shapes, works over, alters - massages - every instant of our lives."
The Medium is the Massage (Penguin, 1967, page 148) - [smart ask]

Now do you get it? [via Where is Raed ?]
Hassan Fattah writes for 'Iraq Today - The Independent Voice of Iraq' - 18.08.2003
The heat radiates off buildings like a hot oven, the humidity turns you into a puddle of sweat. The air is still and you feel like gasping for air. It's impossible to sleep and in the back of your mind, you're wondering whether somebody, anybody, can walk in and rob you. All you keep mumbling is, "when are the lights coming back on?"

Cartesian panic - and its consequences - [SCR 2003, August, No. 1]
"In November 1619, for reasons that may or may not have been purely scientific, a 23-year-old Frenchman secluded himself in a heated room in the Swabian town of Ulm. The epiphany he experienced there has arguably set the agenda for all the psychological sciences since then. Specifically, his stated fear that an evil spirit could deceive him about everything except his experience of a core of subjectivity has had massive consequences. It has cleaved body and mind; self and other; person and physical environment. The violence with which all outside the self became merely res extensa gives pause. Can it be the case that Descartes, totally alone in Germany, had a panic attack that we are still recovering from?"
Sean O'Nuallain

Shia hope assassinated - BBC News - 29.08.03
Ayatollah Mohammad Baqr al-Hakim, who spent 23 years in exile, was one of Iraq's best-known Shia Muslim figures.
"The ayatollah, himself, advocated a modern Islamic state that rejects religious extremism and is independent of foreign powers in Iraq. He also said he favoured free elections for the country."

Reuters reports - Iraq Mosque Bomb Kills 75, Including Shi'ite Leader
Some supporters of the slain Ayatollah Mohammed Baqr al-Hakim, 63, leader of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), blamed Saddam loyalists.
But some commentators pointed to bitter faction-fighting among Iraq's long-repressed Shi'ite majority that has raged in Najaf since the end of the war.
Hakim was for many the leading Shi'ite figure in Iraq and his cooperation with the U.S.-led administration through its Governing Council was seen as crucial to U.S. efforts to stabilize the country and install democratic rule.
"There is a very serious chance that what we are entering here is a Shi'ite civil war akin to what happened in Iran in 1979-80 with rival factions jockeying for power," said Ali Ansari, an expert on Iran at Britain's Durham University.

Iraqi Clerics Unite in Rare Alliance (Anthony Shadid - washingtonpost.com) 17.08.03
"A popular Sunni Muslim cleric has provided grass-roots and financial support to a leading anti-American Shiite cleric ...
The extent of the cooperation remains unclear between Ahmed Kubeisi, a Sunni cleric from a prominent clan in western Iraq, and Moqtada Sadr, the 30-year-old son of a revered Shiite ayatollah assassinated in 1999. But ideologically and practically, it represents a convergence of interests between the two figures ...
U.S. officials declined to say where the money was coming from, but the Iraqi official said he believed it came from private individuals in the Persian Gulf, whose conservative, Sunni Muslim states have viewed with anxiety the prospect of a Shiite-dominated government in neighboring Iraq. By supporting the most radical Shiite elements, he said, they hope to prevent a united Shiite front in the contest for postwar power.
U.S. and Iraqi officials offered different assessments of how Sadr's group may have spent the money."
[via Shi'a Pundit]

Shiite Clerics Clashing Over How to Reshape Iraq - writes Neil MacFarquhar (NY Times)
Najaf, Iraq, August 25, 2003
"The clerics who hold sway over Iraq's Shiite Muslim majority are locked in a violent power struggle pitting the older, established ayatollahs counseling patience with the occupation against a younger, more militant faction itching to found an Islamic state.
The militants are suspected of carrying out a series of attacks, including one over the weekend, engineered to eliminate or at least unsettle Najaf's religious scholars just as Shiites feel their moment has come. The bloodshed started in April with the murder of a prominent young cleric, Abdel Majid al-Khoei, inside the city's most holy shrine."

A Guide to Iraq's Shiite Clerics by Ed Finn and Avi Zenilman - (Slate)
[Moktada] Al-Sadr opposes the U.S. presence in Iraq and wants the country to be an "Islamic nation." However, instead of fighting the American presence head-on, al-Sadr and his followers have been quietly and quickly aggregating power throughout Iraq, hoping to gain so much control that they cannot be ignored. Although he has urged his followers not to "shed blood" while protesting the U.S. presence, his tone is anything but conciliatory; in a speech witnessed by a New York Times reporter, al-Sadr said, "Anyone supported by the United States is cursed by us."

Militants kill Kurd police chief - BBC News - 29.08.03
Kurdish officials in Iraq say their deputy chief of security in the north-eastern province of Sulaymaniyah has been shot dead by Islamic militant group Ansar al-Islam.

Iraq holy city blast kills scores - BBC News - 29.08.03
About 80 people have been killed by a car bomb in the holy city of Najaf - among them leading Shia Muslim politician Ayatollah Mohammed Baqr al-Hakim.
BBC Middle Eastern affairs analyst Roger Hardy says that although critical of the Americans, the 63-year-old ayatollah was ready to work with them - a decision that earned him the hostility of more radical Shia factions.

Attack points to unholy alliance - Roger Hardy, BBC Middle East analyst, writes:
" ... it is also possible that a tactical alliance is emerging between Saddam Hussein loyalists and Islamic militants who have entered Iraq over the last few months.
Since the fall of the Saddam Hussein regime, the Shia have been split over whether to co-operate with the US-led administration.
The leading ayatollahs are critical of the Americans but ready to co-operate with them.
This is the view of two of the main Shia groups - the Daawa Party and Ayatollah Hakim's group, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (Sciri).
This approach has been strongly criticised by a group led by a radical young Shia figure, Muqtada al-Sadr."

The Sadrist Movement - Middle East Intelligence Bulletin (July 2003) - Mahan Abedin writes:
"The Sadrists' chief strength is the legacy of Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr's martyrdom - this is what enables Muqtada al-Sadr to draw tens of thousands of people into the streets at a moment's notice. When Sadr mistook a recent military deployment near his house for American preparations to arrest him, he even managed to mobilize 10,000 demonstrators in Najaf (many, if not most, of whom traveled from Sadr City to put on the show of strength).
However, while Muqtada al-Sadr is undoubtedly charismatic, the inexperienced leader has needlessly antagonized other Shiite groups in his speeches, particularly SCIRI. In early May, he was quoted as saying that SCIRI head Ayatollah Mohammed Sayed al-Hakim "betrayed the people of Basra and the south when he urged them to fight [in the 1991 intifada against Saddam], and didn't come in to help them, causing the intifada to fail."
The Sadrists have recently sought to mend relations with Iran. Pictures of the late Ayatollah Khomeini have been allowed to proliferate in Sadr City and pro-Iranian figures in the movement have been given positions of authority.
Muqtada al-Sadr visited Iran to attend events commemorating the fourteenth anniversary of Ayatollah Khomeini's death on June 4 and spent a week meeting with top Iranian officials, including Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and the head of the judiciary, Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi. He was also reported to have met secretly with Qasim Suleimani, the commander of the Qods Brigade (a special external department within IRGC intelligence)."

Make Iran a friend, not a foe - by Cameron Kamran - Salon.com - 12.02.02
"Perhaps most intriguing of all is the fact that there are no clear-cut battle lines in this war between conservatives and reformers in Iran. Many of the most outspoken reformists are also respected members of the conservative religious establishment. This is a telling measure of how much Iran has evolved since the days of the revolution and how infected with change even the Iranian clerical groups have become. Take Ayatollah Hosein-Ali Montazeri, for instance. In the early years after the revolution, Montazeri was Khomeini's heir apparent and one of the architects of Islamic rule. He preached global Islamic revolution and was a conduit for funds to terrorist groups around the world. Today, Montazeri is one of the fiercest opponents of the ruling clerics, openly criticizing their autocratic rule and personally attacking the supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, himself."

Iran diplomat refused bail - BBC News - 29.08.03
An Iranian ex-diplomat has again been remanded in custody in London over a terror attack which killed 85 people in Argentina.
Hade Soleimanpour, 47, is wanted by the Argentine government to face charges that he helped plan the 1994 bombing of a Jewish community centre in Buenos Aires - the country's worst ever terror attack.

Monsters Were Due on Maple Street - Nick Gillespie - Reason Online - 15.08.03
"It's hard to know all the reasons for the different responses to the '77 and '03 blackouts (one of the great parlor games in New York after the '77 blackout was figuring out why people had acted so much worse than they did during the great '65 blackout). But one of the reasons ..."

US crime hits 30-year low - BBC News - 25.08.03
Crime in the United States fell last year to the lowest level since records started being compiled 30 years ago, the US Justice Department has said.
About 23 million violent and property crimes were reported in 2002, compared with some 44 million in 1973, according to the annual survey by the Bureau of Justice Statistics.
The decline was seen in every category of crime measured by the department.
Attorney General John Ashcroft attributed the drop to the work of police and prosecutors.
But some crime experts say tougher prison sentences and the building of additional prisons are more likely explanations.

Blackout sparks worries for relatives farther south - Tallahassee Democrat - 16.08.03
"Despite some initial fears, the blackout created some unusual moments for Robinson and her neighbors. She said for the first time in memory she was able to see stars in the night sky from the city. With air conditioners off, she and others spent the evening outside by candlelight."

Interfaces to the Sublime - Mark Pesce
"The dark being of the enlightenment is the body. It's that which the Cartesian nature would transcend to become wholly being without body. Yet, the further we travel in our technological development, the more we understand that the body has a transcendental nature which is absolutely vital to the being of man; you can not discard it, any more than you can discard the brain. We are not growing out of the body; we're finding out how to live within it. Like Oroboros, the snake who consumes his own tail, we reach out for the essence of the spiritual and come back firmly grasping our own flesh.
This flesh is the ground for a new articulation of the sacred."

Starry, starry night 70 sextillion, study says - Allison M. Heinrichs
"There are approximately 70 sextillion - that's 7 followed by 22 zeros - stars in the known universe, a team led by Australian astronomer Simon Driver announced ... at the 25th General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union in Sydney, Australia.
That means there are more stars in the sky than there are grains of sand in every beach and desert on Earth."

Light Pollution - not a new problem for astronomers
"I got my first look at a really dark night sky when I was just four years old - it was in 1944 during the second World War. At that time, cities had a night time blackout imposed upon them. There was no street lighting, no advertising lighting and even the buses and the few cars moving on the roads had their headlights reduced to narrow slits. In consequence, the night sky was so dark that the Milky Way could be seen even from London! It must have created quite an impression on me because less than a decade was to pass before I built my first telescope. During that decade however, the rot had already began to set in and by the time I was ready to take a closer look at the night sky, the Milky Way was no longer visible and at least two stellar magnitudes were lost to view.
I began to think seriously about the effects of light pollution recently, because I was asked to submit evidence to a Parliamentary Select Committee which is currently considering the threat imposed to the study of astronomy by this insidious menace. It was pointed out that the night sky is in fact a Site of Special Scientific Interest (an S.S.S.I.), which has at present no legislation to protect it.
Recalling the wartime blackout, reminded me that it was only due to such a blackout imposed on the city of Los Angeles, that the American astronomer Walter Baade was able to make the observations that were to totally alter our conception of the Universe."
Doug Daniels

alex wright - rivers and tides
In Goldsworthy's world, stone turns to liquid, leaves become fabric, vines act like threads, ice is bathed in light ("the power that brings it to life is also the power that destroys it"). Rivers are more than just bodies of water: they are vessels of soil, rocks, trees, silt, water and wind.
The best of Goldsworthy's work seems to evoke a kind of transcendent annihilation. "I think we misread the landscape when we think of it as pastoral and pretty," he says. "There's a darker side to it."

The Dark Cat: Arthur Putnam and a Fragment of Night
"Arthur Putnam's Puma on Guard suggests several readings centering on life and death."
Alexander Nemerov

Disenchanted Night
"The newer the culture is," writes the German journalist and historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch, "the more it fears nightfall." [Amazon.co.uk - Review]

Gaston Bachelard writes: "We live in an age of administered light."
Cited in 'Dust: A History of the Small and Invisible' by Joseph A. Amato in the
Journal of Mundane Behaviour 1.3 (October 2000) [pdf]

This may not stiffen the lizards but is doctor slang on the wane?
The inventive language created by doctors the world over to insult their patients - or each other - is in danger of becoming extinct. [via Follow Me Here: fair and balanced]

"Modern man has lost the option of silence. Try halting your sub-vocal speech. Try to achieve even ten seconds of inner silence. You will encounter a resisting organism that forces you to talk. That organism is the word."
William Burroughs - 'The Ticket that Exploded'

Language Encounters - Kenneth Goldsmith
"As soon as I discovered the Internet, my book began to write itself. Typing was no longer necessary, just copying and pasting. Instead of editing, we now massage our texts."

'You're twisting my melon man' - William Clark

"Antiphanes said humorously that in a certain city words congealed with the cold the moment they were spoken, and later, as they thawed out, people heard in the summer what they had said to one another in the winter ... "
Douglas Kahn - 'Noise Water Meat' - (MIT Press, 1999, page 204)

"If every word spoken daily in New York City were somehow to materialize as a snowflake, each day there would be a blizzard." Kenneth Goldsmith

Original Technology

"Thus considered, what a strange chaos is this wide atmosphere we breathe! Every atom, impressed with good and with ill, retains at once the motions which philosophers and sages have imparted to it, mixed and combined in ten thousand ways with all that is worthless and base. The air itself is one vast library, on whose pages are for ever written all that man has ever said or woman whispered. There, in their mutable but unerring characters, mixed with the earliest, as well as with the latest sighs of morality, stand for ever recorded, vows unredeemed, promises unfulfilled, perpetuating in the united movements of each particle, the testimony of man's changeful will."
Charles Babbage - Ninth Bridgewater Treatise - 1837

posted by Andrew 8/29/2003 04:44:00 PM

Friday, August 15, 2003

 
Ceci N'est Pas Une Pipe

Conduits and Resonance

"The whole organism can be considered as a coded representation of its environment. We can say that the wings of a bird 'represent' the air and the legs of man the land, and similarly that their brains contain representations in code that allow them to fly or walk, and their nerves carry code messages about relevant features of the world.
This conception of organisms as symbolic representations of their environments may seem fanciful. In fact it gives a much deeper insight into life than the usual talk about 'structures' and 'functions', which use analogy with machines. Thom has put it that information equals form ..."
J.Z.Young - Programs of the Brain (Oxford, 1981, page 43)

Requirements and the conduit metaphor - Brian Marick
"Let me contrast the conduit metaphor to something I've heard Dick Gabriel say of poetry: that a poem is a program that runs in the reader's mind."

Biblical Literalism: Constricting the Cosmic Dance by Conrad Hyers
"The literal imagination is univocal. Words mean one thing, and one thing only. They don't bristle with meanings and possibilities; they are bald, clean-shaven. Literal clarity and simplicity, to be sure, offer a kind of security in a world (or Bible) where otherwise issues seem incorrigibly complex, ambiguous and muddy. But it is a false security, a temporary bastion, maintained by dogmatism and misguided loyalty. Literalism pays a high price for the hope of having firm and unbreakable handles attached to reality. The result is to move in the opposite direction from religious symbolism, emptying symbols of their amplitude of meaning and power, reducing the cosmic dance to a calibrated discussion.
One of the ironies of biblical literalism is that it shares so largely in the reductionist and literalist spirit of the age."

Shared Understanding: Implications for Computer Supported Cooperative Work - William T. Hunt
1.2 Cognition In the World
"Besides being shared with others, cognition is also in the artifacts in the world. Gregory Bateson [1972] exemplified it well through a thought experiment:
Suppose I am a blind man, and I use a stick. I go tap, tap, tap. Where do I start? Is my mental system bounded at the handle of the stick? Is it bounded by my skin? Does it start halfway up the stick? Does it start at the tip of the stick? [p. 459]
Suppose the blind man eats his dinner. Then forks, knives, and spoons become relevant. As Michael Cole [1991] and Arthur Bentley [1954] argue, the mind cannot be bound by skin.
Don Norman [1991; 1992, p.19-25] talks of affordances. These are properties of objects. A table affords placing objects on it. A baseball affords throwing but does not afford sitting on. Spoons afford eating soup. So the blind man's understanding of the world is intricately tied to the affordance of his stick. We can talk of these properties of artifacts that extend our minds as affordances."

The Internet and the Future of Art - Eduardo Kac

"It is through the skin that metaphysics must be made to re-enter our minds."
Antonin Artaud

Manuel DeLanda Annotated Bibliography

"Interface design is a pragmatic aspect of the gesture-speech nexus in which gesture is seen as augmenting and combining with speech."
Brian Rotman

Metaphors We Compute By - John M. Lawler
"In spoken language, we appear to be understanding a person through what they say; in written language, on the other hand, we appear to be dealing with the words themselves, and the literal meaning (the word literal itself simply means 'written') becomes a matter of very great importance. If we make a mistake in conversation, we can back up, restate, ask questions, pause, look dumb, or behave in a lot of different ways that can lead to clarification, rather like an elaborate error-trapping routine.
In written language, however, we have much less to go on, and have consequently developed conventions for interpreting the writer's intentions. The Conduit Metaphor, which is a myth that is used to explain how we can communicate, even though we're not telepathic ..."

Foundations of Information Architecture

"Before the end, something is coming to an end. The general digitization of channels and information erases the differences among individual media. Sound and image, voice and text are reduced to surface effects, known to consumers as interface."
Friedrich Kittler

Getting Under the Skin, or, How Faces have become Obsolete - (pdf)
"Beyond even Deleuze and Guattari's call for bodies without organs, the body at the turn of the millennium has turned into an "organ without a body," or better into an "organ instead of a body." In this synechdotal move the first, and probably most important body part that had to be overcome was the face. The face, which has always overcoded other body parts, has now ceased to be the most representative signifier of human appearance; "under the skin" every organ has an (inter)face; potentially, every organ may stand in for the whole body."
Bernadette Wegenstein

Karma Vertigo: or Considering The Excessive Responsibilities Placed On Us By The Dawn Of The Information Infrastructure - Jaron Lanier (1994)
"At first, the design of the network will seem less important than the content that is moved over it. This will be true only for the first generation or two of users. After that it will become apparent that the network's design is like genetic material out of which our culture unfolds, an intimate and pervasive presence, a thing, like the structure of our spoken language, whose influence is too great to be isolated or measured.
The influence of network architecture will re-cast every human endeavor that involves communication across distance or time. We are about to create the material with which our civilization will be largely woven for generations to come. The design of the information infrastructure will form the weave and the flow of its contents, which will be most of what we create together and pass on as a legacy."

Corporeal or Gesturo-haptic Writing - Brian Rotman
"Could motion capture be about to induce a transformation as radical and far-reaching for the body's gestural activities, for its skin and organs of grasping and touching as writing accomplished for the organs of speech? Could bringing (a digitally objectified) gesture out from under the shadow of the spoken word install ...
"Cultures", Merlin Donald reminds us, "restructure the mind, not only in terms of its specific contents, which are obviously culture-bound, but also in terms of its fundamental neurological organization." Likewise, as evolutionary neurologist Terrence Deacon argues, a cultural phenomenon such as the development of language and its ramifications can be seen to have altered the size and overall capacity of the brain (rather than, as is usually supposed, the reverse). In Donalds's case, the arena of this restructuring is the evolution of cognition through neurological changes brought about by culturally mediated systems of external memory (writing for example), which is evidently an instance of technologically mediated exogenesis ... A principal mode of exogenesis is synthetic assemblage, the coming- or putting-together of independent activities to form a new, functionally unified and autonomous, entity with emergent properties not present in its components."

The Panoramic Photography of Luc Courchesne - Brian Massumi
"If we try to imagine the flat surface of the photographic image projected back into three-dimensionality, it makes as much sense, in the image's own distorted terms, to see the fade-out of the fringe folding back around to rejoin the central eclipse, yielding a torus or donut shape, as it [does] to construe it as a spherical band as in the traditional panorama. The panoramic photographic plate suggests its own alternate visual geometry. By folding its outer limit back into itself, the image asserts itself as a form of interiority. It is not so much a represented segment of an outside objective sight as it is a monadic sampling of vision. The monad, says Leibniz, has no windows. It is a pure interiority, yet it connects with the outside: by enveloping it in itself. The point at which the outside enters, the crease, the in-folding, appears as an interior emptiness: the hole in the donut of vision. The black hole of representation at the heart of the image is the trace in it of the process of its production and of the principle of its form. It is where the image most wholly shows itself."

Fractal of the Day by Jim Muth

"My favorite painting of the brain's convoluted surface is not the usual gray modeling-clay rendition but a red and purple rising-sun sphere whose "convolutions" come close to looking like the cracks in a parched mud flat."
William H. Calvin - The Throwing Madonna - Left Brain, Right Brain: Science ..?

naked ape with killer app discovers gap

Conversations with Neil's Brain - William H. Calvin and George A. Ojemann
"Back when Sigmund Freud was peering through a microscope, the gray matter looked like a great spider web of crossing axons. Everything seemed fused together. At some of the intersections, instead of a trapped fly, there was a black bulge, the cell. No "arrows" anywhere, suggesting how information flowed. Freud probably found this rather frustrating, and by the time visualization techniques were improved, he had moved on to view the brain from a very different perspective -- psychoanalysis.
With Camillo Golgi's method of staining a few neurons at a time with silver, Fridtjof Nansen and Santiago Ramon y Cajal independently deduced that the axon actually came to a dead end just outside another cell -- that there was really a gap ..."

The Bob Dobbs dialogue with Randy Koppang, Part 2
BOB: Right. So, it's the fact that you can take any 2 things, which is the essence of relationship. And there's the profound truth that objects are non-selfobservable. Only relationships between objects are observable. And the popular expression of object non-observability was done by Alan Watts, and those popular mystics; where they said you can't see the thing doing the seeing. You can't see conscious self.
Watts often pointed out you can't see your own eyes, as individual perceptors in our reflexive/holographic universe. You've got to have relationship to begin reflexing consciousness and evolve it.
So, consciousness itself is necessarily double. Therefore, it has to include the nothing part of itself and the something part of itself; and can't see itself.
RK: Explaining the defining material component required by the universe, so you can have a reflexive sense...
BOB: ... of spirit!
That was one of Marshall's axes to grind. Because he didn't like the way Western secret societies, and Western philosophy in general, and all the arts and sciences split matter and spirit.
So, you take 2 words. We�ll use these 2 words Creative Evolution. There seems to be 2 patterns here, in terms of humanity's "normal" experience of itself (remembering that, on the one hand, humanity was an object that was non-selfobserving of its collective-self until now; until reflexive electric media and cyber-introspection): most people see that things stay the same. But they're also aware there's change going on; those are like 2 archetypal cognitive processers. Culturely, then, the things remaining the same are called isomorphic. The term isomorphic means a form which keeps showing up; in nature, through man's eyes, or in Jungian archetypal forms, through the studying of various cultures. But, the other part is the metamorphic. The change which is creating a feeling of newness, and novelty.
Like, this is exactly the same environment (here, now) as yesterday. Yet, this is different for us, at the same time."

The Visual System - Luc Courchesne
"The apparent corresponding geometry between the external reality and the brain's internal reconstruction of it inspires my somewhat poetic model, described below. It presents the external and the internal as two polarities and the experience of consciousness as a reverberation resulting from transfers between the two. Here the whole cortex is seen as a screen on which the environment is projected, and the environment as a screen on which the cortex is projected -- or the interface of the two as the locus of a freely floating consciousness.
It is interesting at this point, as the recycling of the mind by the environment and the environment by the mind proceeds, to consider both mind and environment as the artifact of the other. Furthermore, one can now argue about what constitutes the boundary between the two. The boundary exists. It is a product of the discovery of the self, but it appears to move inwards and outwards depending on either mental or environmental conditions. The inside adjusts itself to the outside and vice versa. The inside or the self may appear to inflate in darkness and retract in daylight and in that sense, the skin is a constantly shifting boundary. Someone's car in a traffic jam, or clothes in a crowd, or skin in a sauna, or even someone's inhibitions on the sofa of a psychiatrist are felt like alternating tangibles ... "

Guy Da Silva's Paper
Konrad Lorenz: "We should stop searching for the <> between animality and humanity because we are the <>".

String, and Knot, Theory of Inca Writing - John Noble Wilford
"A reading of the knotted string devices, if deciphered, could perhaps reveal narratives ..."

Turns of Phrase

"When setting out on the path of media ecology, we find that turning off the TV provides slack for deprogramming the cine-anaesthesia TV forces upon us. And we can then revisit an understanding of human language as a technology vs. the capacity of our intelligence to express ourselves in language."
Randy Koppang

Pattern Recognition
"Adorno notoriously said that it was barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz. You might say that the ironic fulfillment of Adorno's warning is precisely our current state of affairs in which everything is poetry -- by which I mean that everything is "culture," and that culture is increasingly indistinguishable from advertising, or from product design (as Andy Warhol was the first person to clearly understand). But Gibson suggests, however waveringly, that it is precisely, and only, in this void that an aesthetics could possibly be reinvented. The novel ..."

Ceci N'est Pas Une Nike - Campbell, Campbell, Campbell,
Campbell, Super-Cannes, Super-Cannes, Can-Can

"One machine is always coupled wiv another."
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari - 'Anti-Oedipus' (1973)

Erosional Spirituality
"Maybe weather is like skin ..."
An interview with Terry Tempest Williams

Andy Warhol
"The Campbell soup cans that Andy painted and silkscreened in the 1960s, which helped make him famous, are usually interpreted as commentaries on mechanical reproduction. However, displacement and other metaphoric processes contributed to his choice of Campbell soup as subject, and connected the image to his erotic hungers. Indeed, cans, in Warhol's work, continue the task of [his earlier] "cock drawings," for cans allude to the sexual body, and to limbs iconically isolated from the whole: as a foot (in his drawings) is divorced from the body, or a penis (in his "cock drawings") is featured in relative isolation from the face and torso, so the can is alienated from the act of eating that it nonetheless announces as a purchasable possibility. The can's most arresting word -- the eye ignores it for the first hundred times -- is condensed: "Campbell's Condensed." Condensation is a property of dreams and the unconscious; the soup-can fetish condenses Andy's unspeakable interior procedures, and gives them a shopwindow's attractiveness."
Wayne Koestenbaum - 'Andy Warhol' (Phoenix, 2003, page 39)

Hypertext - words in print
"The medium is not the message, for one medium will incarnate many messages. But medium and message interact. The medium is neither container nor vehicle nor track. The message is neither content nor cargo nor projectile ..."
Ong - 'Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology' (Cornell University Press, 1971, page 271)

Treachery of Images - This is not a post
"Victory and defeat - I don't believe it!" Meldrew Gilligan

Niels Ole Finnemann - Informational notation and the algorithmic revolution
"Where Hjelmslev at the time was puzzled by his own statement that "it is in the nature of language to be overlooked", that is, was concealed behind the auditive or alphabetical clothing, we are puzzled today by the fact that, as far as informational notation is concerned, it is the clothing, the expression form, which cannot be seen."

Havelock - The literate revolution in Greece and its cultural consequences
"Once invented, [the Greek alphabet] supplied the complete answer to a problem, and there has never been need to reinvent it. The Roman and Cyrillic variants are just that, and no more. The problem had been to devise a system of 'shapes' (as the Greeks properly called them) of required small sizes, with maximum economy, (so far, the Phoenician achievement) such as would, despite the economy, when seen (or as we say, 'read') in endless variety of linear arrangements automatically trigger an acoustic memory of the complete spoken speech indexed by the shapes."

The Context of Communication, Part 2 - Glenn Vanderburg
"Although "convection currents of information" is clearly squarely in line with the conduit metaphor, it's interesting that so much of what Alistair talks about is implicit, serendipitous communication. He talks about information radiators and other explicit channels, but the emphasis is on building a context where information simply flows, implicitly and effortlessly."

Conduit Metaphor
"The whole notion of 'sending' and 'receiving' may be misleading, since, after all, once I've 'sent' a message, I still have it."
Mick Underwood

John Pritchard : Installation Two : The History of Nike
"In 1984, Tinker Hatfield, a former pole-vaulter and architect, worked his way into the shoe industry. Converse's early 1970's slogan, 'Limousines for the Feet', gave Hatfield the idea that "an athletic shoe is a kind of cartoon," a cartoon of a car."

Hieroglyphs of Engined Egypsians - Theall
Our producers are they not our consumers?

posted by Andrew 8/15/2003 03:26:00 PM

Saturday, August 02, 2003

 
interficial intelligence

Greg Ritter - Why RSS is (or should be) as irrelevant as HTML
"Phones, electricity, cars, CD players -- these are mature technologies that have abstracted their guts behind common, usable interfaces. Why should we expect less from syndication/aggregation software? Or software in general?"

Gene J. Koprowski - Socially Intelligent Software: Agents Go Mainstream
"Beyond consumer applications, agents are even routing and scheduling warplanes on aircraft carriers ..."

Paul Newman: Interview - 18th December 1998
What is your idea of perfect happiness?
Paul Newman: "Viagra for the brain."

Sam Vaknin - A Brief History of the Book
"In many respects, audio books are much more revolutionary than e-books. They do not employ visual symbols (all other types of books do), or a straightforward scrolling method. E-books, on the other hand, are a throwback to the days of the papyrus. The text cannot be opened at any point in a series of connected pages and the content is carried only on one side of the (electronic) "leaf". Parchment, by comparison, was multi-paged, easily browseable, and printed on both sides of the leaf. It led to a revolution in publishing ...
At the beginning of the 19th century, innovative lithographic and offset processes allowed publishers in the West to add illustrations (at first, black and white and then in color), tables, detailed maps and anatomical charts, and other graphics to their books. Battles fought between publishers-librarians over formats (book sizes) and fonts (Gothic versus Roman) were ultimately decided by consumer preferences. Multimedia was born."

RAND: The Information Age and the Printing Press: Looking Backward to See Ahead
"Eisenstein argues that, while the medieval Catholic church was a prolific user of printing, the changes it wrought were outside the control of the church. The proliferation of different biblical texts eventually cast into doubt the existence of a single infallible text. This led to alternative interpretations such as Luther's, but the ability to publicize those interpretations by the same means of printing kept them from being crushed as were earlier heresies.
As for the Renaissance ...
Eisenstein points out that the Italian renaissance differed little from earlier ones until the printing press "fixed" it and helped spread it north of the Alps. "Typographical fixity" refers to the preservative power of print. Ideas recorded in only a few manuscripts were always in danger of being forgotten or lost by the intellectual community. Put those same ideas in hundreds of identical printed copies, and they were much more likely to spread and endure."
James A. Dewar

Treasured Koran goes digital
The work is a masterpiece of Islamic calligraphy
The British Library in London has made a digital version of a 700-year-old copy of the Koran, so that visitors can browse it without damaging the original.

"What is the Future of the Book in the Digital Era?" [also here]
"The book remains one of the most robust, useful, and universal technologies ever invented. It comprises a bundle of technologies -- alphabets, type, codices, indices, paper, printing and distribution tools. The last three technologies are running up against the resource limitations of the planet: even if an effective organic substitute for paper could be found, arable land will never get cheaper. The cost of imprinting ink on paper (compared to the cost of displaying electrons on a screen) and the increasing costs of using petroleum and other energy sources to move bundles of paper around the world are the other limiting factors. But the user interface of a book is unlikely to be surpassed in an affordable form for decades and probably centuries." Howard Rheingold

Cultures of the Book: Bibliography
James J. O'Donnell writes: "I am fond of B. Messick, The Calligraphic State, on modern Yemen, which survived as a handwriting-based culture into contemporary times ..."

Diamond Sutra: The World's Earliest Dated Printed Book
Jin gang ban ruo bo luo mi jing. (The Sanskrit Vajracchedika-Prajnaparamitasutra, translated into Chinese by Kumarajiva.) The Diamond Sutra of AD 868.
Although not the earliest example of blockprinting, it is the earliest which bears an actual date. The colophon, at the inner end, reads: 'Reverently [caused to be] made for universal free distribution by Wang Jie on behalf of his two parents on the 13th of the 4th moon of the 9th year of Xiantong [i.e. 11th May, AD 868]'.

Johannes Gutenberg and the Printing Press - Mary Bellis
"The earliest dated printed book known is the "Diamond Sutra", printed in China in 868 CE. However, it is suspected that book printing may have occurred long before this date. In 1041, movable clay type was first invented in China. Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press with replaceable wooden or metal letters ..."

Update - World's First Metal Type Born in Korea
"In Koryo, a state which existed in 918 - 1392 AD, the world's first metal type was invented and put into use in printing already in the late 12th century.
Based on the highly developed wood-block printing technique which had already been in practice since the time of the Three Kingdoms in the 7th century ..."

Adam Brate - Technomanifestos: Print
"Until writing was invented, man lived in acoustic space: boundless, directionless, horizonless, in the dark of the mind, in the world of emotion, by primordial intuition, by terror. Speech is a social chart of this bog.

The goose quill put an end to talk. It abolished mystery; it gave architecture and towns; it brought roads and armies, bureaucracy. It was the basic metaphor with which the cycle of civilization began, the step from the dark into the light of the mind. The hand that filled the parchment page built a city.

Whence did the wond'rous mystic art arise,
Of painting SPEECH, and speaking to the eyes?
That we by tracing magic lines are taught,
How to embody, and to colour THOUGHT?

Printing, a ditto device, confirmed and extended the new visual stress. It provided the first uniformly repeatable "commodity," the first assembly line - mass production.

It created the portable book, which men could read in privacy and in isolation from others. Man could now inspire - and conspire.

Like easel painting, the printed book added much to the new cult of individualism. The private, fixed point of view became possible and literacy conferred the power of detachment, non-involvement."
The Medium is the Massage - Marshall McLuhan
(Penguin, 1967, pages 48-50)

Johann Gutenberg - Wikipedia
Gutenberg's methods were certainly efficient, leading to a boom in the production of texts ...

The Gutenberg Bible - Printing - Printing, a ditto device
"In the fifteenth century Johannes Gutenberg invented a way of producing movable metal type, as well as printer's ink and the printing press, leading the way to mass production of books. The Gutenberg Bible, printed in Germany in around 1455, was the first substantial book to be printed using moveable type."

The Development of Print Technology
"The printing press is not a single invention. It is the aggregation in one place, of technologies known for centuries before Gutenberg."

The Printing Press - Re: wine press
"Gutenberg's key invention was the moveable metal type. The press had been in existence for centuries in the form of the common screw press, which was used to press oil from olives, wine from grapes, or water from newly made paper. Printer's ink was also a completely new development. Unlike ink applied with the pen, printing ink had to be highly viscous, like a thick paste. Gutenberg's ink formula, oil paint with a high copper and lead content, is still black and glossy after 500 years.
The type used to print the Gutenberg Bibles is called B42. B standing for Bible and 42 for the number of lines of print per page the type allowed."

Illuminating the Renaissance
From 1400 to 1550 European manuscript painting enjoyed a glorious final flowering � particularly in Flanders (part of modern-day Belgium and Northern France).

Resisting the Psychotic Library - Grant Williams (pdf)
"In an effort to assemble a collection of international reputation, Oxford's famous library, the Bodleian, aggressively sought benefactors and employed book agents to make purchases at European book fairs. Moreover, upon the counsel of its librarian, Thomas James, the Bodleian arranged in 1610 with the Stationers Company - the London publishing guild - an agreement that would grant to the collection a copy of every work printed by the guild's members. Not only did the presses produce more and more English books for a burgeoning home market, but stationers also gravitated to novel topics out of a conviction that any publication�s success would erode the demand for similar books.
Yet the library could not accommodate market forces and still maintain a bibliocentric orientation based on the pressmark system. Since the late medieval period, the development of pressmark systems had reinforced the fixed space of the book. Certain disciplinary subjects were kept in certain cupboards or presses; a pressmark on the volume or the bookpress itself would indicate the specific bookcase, the specific shelf, and the book's exact position on the shelf. The system presupposes that the order of knowledge is immovable: inserting a new volume into the order would mean modifying many other assigned press numbers at best or at worst modifying the existing space of knowledge. To overcome the impasse between accommodating market forces and maintaining the pressmark system, Thomas James reoriented the conceptual matrix of the library. The Bodleian's books were for shelving purposes arranged according to three sizes - folio, quarto, and octavo, with subdivisions by the four faculties. Whereas folios, chained to the shelves, had specific pressmarks, the quartos and octavos were stored differently. To make room for an ever-growing collection, James dispensed with designated shelf positions and arranged each volume under the author's initial and a consecutive number. The librarian could assimilate a new acquisition whenever he wanted, without needing to change any pressmarks. All he had to do was add the next number to the appropriate open series. This method, known as relative location, forms the basis of all modern shelving arrangements. By embracing relative location, the early modern library inscribed within its limits the possibility of infinite expansion. Consequently, James's preface to the 1620 catalogue advised librarians to employ subject divisions in the catalogue, not the library itself. It seemed that the Bodleian's arrangement would always resist a totalizing classification, because the collection on the shelves was subordinated to a numerical series arbitrarily related to any epistemological disposition. The symbolic order of the early modern library was no longer structured around the fixed place of the book, or the fixed nature of authority."
Grant Williams notes:
"An early example of the principle of fixed location may be found in Cassiodorus Senator, An Introduction to Divine and Human Readings, translated and edited by Leslie Webber Jones (New York: Columbia University Press, 1946, page 93) who refers the reader to a Greek commentary in the eighth bookcase, as if the library's arrangement will never change."

Bruce Jones - On Manuscripts
"For all their beauty ... the manuscripts of the monasteries did little to affect life in Europe. Primarily this comes about as a consequence of the inaccessibility of the monastic libraries. Instead of books being openly available as they are today, manuscript books were mostly locked up in monasteries strewn across Europe. Given the amount of time and energy and financial resources that went into their production, books were far too valuable to make available to the general public. So there was no way to use them for scholarship, even the few secular texts that may have been available.
This problem was compounded by the lack of a uniform cataloging system in the monasteries. So, even if one did have access to the library of a monastery, there was no way of knowing what was in the collection, or where it might be located."

John Banville reviews 'Adam's Navel' - NYTimes - Sunday 27 July, 2003
Sims describes ''Adam's Navel'' as ''something of a hybrid,'' which is something of an understatement. (Entering into the Simsian spirit, I cannot forbear to note the source of the word ''hybrid'' according to Chambers Dictionary: ''L. hybrida, offspring of a tame sow and wild boar.'')

Time Wounds All Heels: [Isadora] Duncan, Ballet, and Bataille - Joanne Pearson

"When Plato classified the human race as featherless bipeds - demonstrating why he is not remembered as a taxonomist - Diogenes supposedly presented a plucked cock to the Academy with the remark, 'This is Plato's man.' The academicians were forced to extend Plato's definition to include a qualifying clause: 'with broad flat nails.'"
Michael Sims - Adam's Navel (Penguin, 2003, page 297)

As We May Communicate - Carson Reynolds
"The computer interface's capacity for polymorphism is one of its strongest advantages, and yet, interfaces have been modeled upon static objects ... "

user mythology - quinn norton [via matt webb]
"people are continual myth creators. their interface with technology is no exception - the body of use mythos is incredibly rich and voluminous. it is an organic knowledge base, shifting and changing continually. it is highly gestaltic, and little can be gleaned from this knowledge base through reductionism and careful measurement. as a result the formal sciences which have influenced the field of user interface neglect this body of information."

A Saint for the Internet?
"The saint who wrote the well-known 'Etymologies' (a type of dictionary), gave his work a structure akin to that of the database. He began a system of thought known today as "flashes;" it is very modern, notwithstanding the fact it was discovered in the sixth century. Saint Isidore accomplished his work with great coherence: it is complete and its features are complementary in themselves."

Alex Mauron - Is the Genome the Secular Equivalent of the Soul?
"The human genome has been labeled the "Book of Man" and its decoding likened to the search for the Holy Grail ...
If one sees nature as structured by sharp borders between species, by clear-cut differences between specific genomes (each genome being the eidos that cleanly defines the species), then it is easy to see how mixing genes from different species would be considered a suspicious and unclean hybridization. The very existence of recombinant DNA technology thus provides a kind of cognitive dissonance around taxonomic borders that could and has resulted in moral disapproval."

Gutenberg machine creates books - Wed, 4 December, 1455
Modified wine press stamps words onto paper, threatening employment of monks and scribes in document production. But may be work of Devil, experts warn

A Taxonomy of User-Interface Metaphors
"In particular, orientational metaphors tend to be used for quantification and navigation."

The Centre for the History of the Book
Gif of a Book Wheel

WWW and the Demise of the Clockwork Universe
"The traditional "clockwork universe" view of the world which was advanced by Newton and Laplace was based on the execution of a few simple laws (e.g., F=MA), starting from complex initial conditions (the position and momenta of all particles in the universe). Although physicists gave up on this idea at the time of Heisenberg, its analog has carried forth in many other areas of thought. This "divide and conquer" mindset has lead us to [create] 'divide and conquer organizations' in economics, other sciences, education, medicine, and information technologies, as well as other places.
Computer science has been subject to this kind of thinking, which has resulted in many different levels of reductionistic thinking: hierarchical decomposition, structured analysis and programming, various systems engineering approaches, etc. These approaches work in some domains which can be characterized as having complex initial conditions (expressed as requirements), executed with simple laws (the variants of structured programming). We "normalize" our data by structuring it into densely packed rectangular tables; data which doesn't fit these rigid conditions are considered "unnormalized", which is somewhat akin to the pope calling all people not in his church "non-catholics." Indeed, the prefix "hier" means sacred or holy. Hierarchical decomposition of systems into functional components has become the sacred quest of today's computer systems architects.
The model presented in this paper presents a radically different view of the information system. It begins with simple initial conditions: as simple as possible, and then allows the system to evolve as a complex adaptive system which is adapting to its environment."

History of the Book
Plow me with a point of bone

Built for Use
"It is about time that designers of digital experiences thought hard about why a dog has so much more interface intelligence than any computer."
Nicholas Negroponte

Finnegans Wake 1.1.18
(Stoop) if you are abcedminded, to this claybook, what curios of signs (please stoop), in this allaphbed! Can you rede (since We and Thou had it out already) its world?

In love with what we see before us - Melody Herr
"Alice wasn't the only adventurer to discover the doorway to Wonderland. Aztec priests and Greek philosophers, Renaissance painters and Shakespearean heroes, vaudeville magicians and modern astronomers have also gone through the looking glass."

New research aims to catch liars in the act
"In the quest to build a better lie detector, scientists are seeking to go beyond the body's indirect signals to the very seat of deceit: the brain."

Bioethics & The Brain
"Brain fingerprinting may seem similar to a polygraph (usually called a lie detector), but it differs in important ways. A polygraph measures physiologic responses such as heart rate, sweating, breathing, and other processes that are only indirectly related to brain function. Brain fingerprinting's information comes directly from brain function. It and other related tests do not measure truthfulness, but seek to determine whether the subject has a particular memory."

The Unreliable Superego - Adam Phillips' revealing new edition of Freud - Adam�Kirsch
"... Freud's approach to jokes, slips of the tongue, dreams, and memories is that of a literary critic. He contends that any "text," from a nightmare to a six-digit number chosen at random, has an "author" in the unconscious; and like a good "close reader," he is always asking why something is expressed in just these words and images. In fact, one might say that Freud's innovation was to treat all of human consciousness as a book, where nothing is written down without a reason."

Worldview Commitments
Freud was supremely confident of his ability to discern secrets hidden even from a patient's own consciousness: "no mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore."

Snape for Dummies
"The mind is not a book, to be opened at will and examined at leisure. Thoughts are not etched on the inside of skulls, to be perused by any invader."
J.K.Rowling - Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Bloomsbury, 2003, pages 468-9)

Intentional Systems - Daniel C. Dennett
"Let the introspector amass as much inside information as you please; he must then communicate it to us, and what are we to make of his communications?"

Intel Researchers Teach Computers to 'read lips'...
"Today's speech recognition algorithms work well when background noise is eliminated or a well-tuned headset is used, but their accuracy rapidly degrades when applications have to cope with noisy environments, such as public places. Combined with face detection algorithms from Intel's OpenCV computer vision library, Audio Visual Speech Recognition (AVSR) software enables computers to detect a speaker's face and track their mouth movements."

Hidden in every brain there lurks a poet - Brad Evenson
"The brain's desire to bend language is universal, regardless of what form that language takes. Being creative -- whether with paints, a violin, written metaphors or ASL poetry -- is somehow central to our mental equilibrium."

Chomsky's (mis)understanding of human thinking - Yehouda Harpaz
"I gazed at the emperor's trunk, which was packed full of doublet & hose."

The Emperor's New Clothes
"It never seems to have even occurred to Freud that an individual man's 'unconscious mind' could be anything but a 'somewhat' lodged inside the box of his bones. Representation, as a principle, is accepted by him as a matter of course; inasmuch as a great variety of dream-imagery is interpreted as symbolizing physical functions. From the perception that physical functions and organs are themselves representations, he is, however, cut off by all the assumptions of idolatry."
Owen Barfield - Saving the Appearances

"The hard-hat model of an objective reality has had to yield to a growing perception that the objective is, in form at least, a construct: what we appear to see is a function of the manner of seeing (hardly a new idea to Greek philosophy), but with the awkward complication that the cogitating I arises from the structures which it sees and orders."
Alex Comfort - Reality & Empathy: Physics, Mind, and Science in the 21st Century

Doorknobs, steering wheels, spacesuits - these are all interfaces.

Contemplation & Application - Medieval & Modern
"Bacon was more impressed by the meaning of print as applied knowledge than anybody else except Rabelais. The entire Middle Ages had regarded Nature as a Book to be scanned for the [vestiges of god] vestigia dei. Bacon took the lesson of print to be that we could now literally get Nature out in a new and improved edition. An encyclopedia is envisaged. It is his complete acceptance of the idea of the Book of Nature that makes Bacon so very medieval and so very modern. But the gap is this. The medieval Book of Nature was for contemplatio like the Bible. The Renaissance Book of Nature was for applicatio and use like movable types.
... Erasmus directed the new print technology to the traditional uses of grammatica and rhetoric and to tidying up the sacred page. Bacon used the new technology for an attempt to tidy up the text of Nature. In the different spirit of these works one can gauge the efficacy of print in preparing the mind for applied knowledge."
Marshall McLuhan - The Gutenberg Galaxy (Mentor, 1969, page 223)

Music 'makes the brain learn better'
Music lessons enrich the brain
Music Training Fine-Tunes Memory
Music Instruction Aids Verbal Memory

Music boosts kids' memory - Geoff Maynard - Daily Express, 28 July 2003, page 23
Dr Chan ... cautioned that it was too simplistic to divide brain functions strictly into left and right.
"Our brain works rather like a network system," he said. "It is interconnected, very co-operative and amazing."

Hart Seely - 'Rumsfeld's free-speaking verse - The Poetry of D.H. Rumsfeld'
"Rumsfeld's poetry is paradoxical: It uses playful language to address the most somber subjects: war, terrorism, mortality. Much of it is about indirection and evasion: He never faces his subjects head on but weaves away, letting inversions and repetitions confuse and beguile."

Inside the Skull House - A Neuropoesis - Joel Weishaus
In its quest to understand itself, Brain is set adrift on a stormy vocabulary. There are promising landfalls, numinous adventures, and a beckoning horizon that serves as a learning curve, "linking acts and footsteps," conjuring a mind that describes a journey while unpacking a life.

The Language Police Live Inside of My Head - Bernard Chapin
Last year I was previewing a textbook that I was about to use in a Human Development course I was teaching. The book was the usual flamboyant montage of facts, grids, and pictures, but then I suddenly ran across a most unusual sentence. It read, "As a folksinger once sang, how many roads must an individual walk down before you can call them an adult." I was stupefied.
Of course, I realized that they were quoting from a Bob Dylan song that was a hit on its own and later one for Peter, Paul, and Mary. The lyrics in actuality are: "how many roads must a man walk down before you can call him a man." At first I wondered how they could legally get away with doing what they did, but then I noticed that they had not identified the singer or used quotation marks around the line they cited. I wondered why anyone would do such a thing. I quickly realized that their rationale for brutally changing the words of one of our finest songwriters was due to their desire to be "inclusive" and not exclude women from the realm of adulthood by saying "man" alone. This kind of "Pamperfication" (my term) of students and treating them like Faberge eggs ...

The Seven Liberal Arts
"Originally the liberal arts were seven in number. They were divided into the three-fold Trivium of Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric, and the four-fold Quadrivium of Arithmetic, Geometry, Music, and Astronomy. These words mean, respectively, a three-way and a four-way crossroads, implying that these paths of knowledge are fundamentally interconnected -- and, by extension, that all other paths can be found to intersect here, as well."

New Encyclopedia Gives Cool-Hunters a Road Map for Ads - Edward Rothstein
"Advertisements are a form of communication, not mere manipulation: they help make sense of the world, defining its differences and essences, filtering through its variety, making claims and constructing images. The final task - discerning knowledge amid the claims and images - makes us all cool-hunters in training."

Opaque Melodies -Darren Tofts
"True compilations, like collage, are eclectic, bringing together items drawn from different contexts, different locations, into a contextual dislocation. That is, to dislocate is not to separate or disintegrate, but rather to re-locate something in another context, often, as in collage, in surprising, even disturbing ways."

'The Lion's Grave' and 'The Sewing Circles of Herat' reviewed by Veronica Horwell
"And beyond the door of the "Golden Needle Ladies' Sewing Classes" in Herat, Lamb is awed by that cultured city's resistance, which was appropriately literary: young women clandestinely studying Shakespeare, James Joyce, Nabokov and Persian poetry, with a child to watch in the lane outside for a Taliban raid. Two girls confess to doing mathematical calculus in secret for fear their brains would die and risking their lives for a smuggled video of Titanic ..."

Lion of the Panjshir - Ahmed Shah Masoud
"Masoud had an ornately bound volume of the works of 14th century Persian Sufi poet Hafiz. He asked Khalili to recite over and over again a favorite verse about friends sitting, talking, enjoying a night like many nights to come, though this night "will never be repeated."
The two friends gazed out at the village of Khodja Bahauddin, the stars, the Amu Darya River -- until about 4 a.m. Masoud was barely asleep when his personal secretary delivered news that Bismillah Khan's front line had held."

The New York Review of Books - The Last Humanist - by Clifford Geertz
"Ernst Gombrich ... was the last of the great Central European humanists who sought to realize the dream, first set forth by Jakob Burckhardt in the 1860s, of a Kulturwissenschaft: a comprehensive, "scientific" study of Western high culture that was at the same time a defense of that culture against the terrible simplifiers of modern barbarism. Ernst Robert Curtius, Erich Auerbach, and Leo Spitzer in literature, Ernst Cassirer, Karl Popper, and Paul Oskar Kristeller in philosophy, and Erwin Panofsky, along with Gombrich, in art history, most of them refugees from Germany and Austria to Britain and the United States in the late Thirties and early Forties, produced a series of formidable works, synoptic, self-confident, and astonishingly learned, that sought to reclaim the heritage of European scholarship after the fascist catastrophe and to reestablish it in the, as they saw it, thin and directionless postwar world. The words with which Curtius, who stayed behind in Bonn quietly writing his way through the horror, prefaced his grand, unbending study of Latin literature in the Middle Ages - begun in 1928, finished in 1948 - could have served as motto for them all: "This book does not content itself with scientific purposes; it attests to a concern for maintaining Western civilization."

Edward Said - A window on the world
"As a humanist whose field is literature, I am old enough to have been trained 40 years ago in the field of comparative literature, whose leading ideas go back to Germany in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. I must mention too the supremely creative contribution of Giambattista Vico, the Neapolitan philosopher and philologist whose ideas anticipate those of German thinkers such as Herder and Wolf, later to be followed by Goethe, Humboldt, Dilthey, Nietzsche, Gadamer, and finally the great 20th-century Romance philologists Erich Auerbach, Leo Spitzer, and Ernst Robert Curtius.
To young people of the current generation the very idea of philology suggests something impossibly antiquarian and musty, but philology in fact is the most basic and creative of the interpretive arts. It is exemplified for me most admirably in Goethe's interest in Islam generally, and the 14th-century Persian Sufi poet Hafiz in particular, a consuming passion which led to the composition of the West-Ostlicher Diwan, and it inflected Goethe's later ideas about Weltliteratur, the study of all the literatures of the world as a symphonic whole which could be apprehended theoretically as having preserved the individuality of each work without losing sight of the whole."

Finnegans Wake Concordex - Part:1 Episode:1 Page:24
"And would again could whispring grassies wake him and may again when the fiery bird disembers."

Myths-Dreams-Symbols
"The basic theme of mythology is that the visible world is supported and sustained by an invisible world." Joseph Campbell

Simple Cells React Quickly To Membrane Voltage Change
Since cells move with voltage, and movement produces sound waves, Sachs predicts that the brain emits sounds during activity ...

posted by Andrew 8/02/2003 04:27:00 PM